News from EDOS: finding outdated packages

The best-known tool from the EDOS project, today called dose-debcheck, analyses the installability of packages according to its metadata (conflicts, dependencies,etc.). This allows us to find packages that certainly are not installable, but it is not always very helpful to pinpoint the origin of a problem. In this talk we present a new notion: A package is outdated if it is not installable, and furthermore if the only way to make it installable is to update the package itself, as opposed to mereley upgrading some of its dependencies. It turns out that this property can be defined in terms of installability in possible future versions of a repository. We explain how our algorithm can actually check this property, and we report on our experience with running the tool in debian.

This is joint work with Pietro Abate, Roberto Di Cosmo, and Stefano Zacchiroli.